If you are in the London catchment area and are an Open Source geek, keep an eye on The Google London Open Source Jam page – I would link to an umbrella page on the Wiki, but onesuch does not seem to exist (?) although there are links for previous events they’ve done.

This month was pretty cool, not least since Google provides all of free software, free beer and free pizza

…but also you get to see neat stuff like the OneLaptopPerChild device in action – which somehow made me vaguely nostalgic for the ZX80 / ZX81 and Spectrum – and the Trolltech Linux Phone:

(Quoth DME – “…the joypad’s horrible…”) – and there were representatives of LinuxChix there, and one of them had brought a PS3 from Sony running Linux – cute, but not actually very interesting when you are not permitted to do decent graphics under Linux (Sony restrictions enforce this) so unless you want to do some hard floating-point numbercrunching on the Cell processor, why not buy a real PC?

Also there was no evidence of /usr/games/tombraider, so doubly what’s the point? 🙂

One of the talks I found oddly most interesting was the chap from coworking.info, a band of folks who fill the gap in the market for places that nomadic independent geeks can work, in big cities; the three biggest reasons I go into the office rather than work at home are:

1. Coffee on tap.
2. I’d go crazy without people to talk to about stuff; work/social/whatever.
3. (flipside) Bumping into random people for a chat makes me more effective.

…and when I am travelling I tend to drop into local Sun office anyhow, to sync e-mail, meet the locals and drink the coffee. It’s like having your own personal Geek Gentlemen’s Club. The coworking.info people have spotted that proles normal people might also appreciate something like this and are forming a loose-knit society to provide these environments globally.

It sounds a good idea to me. Also, from their website I found trustedplaces.com which seems similarly like a good idea.

ps: Kudos to Ben Laurie for the invite / heads-up.